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For many years, the champions of Hubble lobbied NASA, the Congress, and the various Presidents to provide funding for a final space shuttle repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. A few of the key components had broken down over its long life span and an upgrade / repair would work wonders.

After much wrangling, the wishes were granted and STS-125 was scheduled and flew earlier this year. And now the mission is paying off. Just take a look at the spectacular picture below!

This picture shows the light spectrum from Eta Carinae, a truly massive star (100 times the size of Sol). You can see the signatures if the various elements plotted on the image. The jumbo “bubbles” on the sides of the star are gases that result from huge explosions from within. In other words, we should be glad we don’t live on a planet anywhere near here!

I’m looking forward to more great images and science from Hubble. And it can only get better with the JWST, which launches in 2014.

The above is an image of the winning selection! Arp 274 is classified as a peculiar galaxy in that it does not follow a traditional spiral or elliptical shape. Halton Arp developed the original list of 338 peculiar galaxies. Arp 274 is one of just a handful of known “tripletts”, three galaxies all interacting with one another.

This is a stunning photo! Up until now, many of the best pictures for this region of the sky were fuzzy and in black & white. Well, the Hubs has changed all that. I am sure that it was just coincidence that the announcement for the winner of this contest happened just as NASA is prepped to launch a final Hubble servicing mission (Atlantis is already on the launch pad) :-). The mission designers are giving us at least another 5 years out of the nearly 20 year old hardware. That puts us right on track to start analyzing results from Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled for a 2013 launch. This is a great time to be an astronomer!